But even smothered under this formula, two things emerge. As always, it’s taken at ballad tempo, and the arrangement ladles on strings and the “ooh”s of a wordless choir. On 1963’s Laughing on the Outside, she starts off with the Hoagy Carmichael classic “Skylark”, for example. But the label would continue to position her between jazz/pop singing and something more soulful. “It Ain’t Necessarily So” from Porgy and Bess is a cleaner fit, and it’s really cool to hear Franklin on piano on “Who Needs You”, where her singing sounds more truly at home.įranklin’s production budgets would rise for the following Columbia recordings. “Love Is the Only Thing” is a Sam Cooke-styled soft R&B ditty, with a harmony vocal on the lead and growling tailgate trombone around the edges. “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” sounds awkwardly in the middle, with a guitar twanging behind her even though she never really lets go with the emotion that is her strong suit. They started her with a small band led by a jazz pianist, and Aretha Franklin with the Ray Bryant Combo is positioned neither as a real jazz date nor as rhythm and blues. Aretha Franklin, a Genuinely Original (Jazz?) Singer of StandardsĪt first, Columbia seemed to see Franklin as either a jazz singer in the Sarah Vaughan mold or possibly an artist like Nina Simone, who straddled categories. We can hear the jazz singer that Franklin never became, the song stylist she certainly was, and the soul star who was still trying to find the right setting for her passion. Although the label had a hip line-up of jazz artists like Miles Davis and Charlie Mingus by 1960 when it came to singers, the approach was: hit songs, strings, keep it middle of the road.Īs a result, listening to the first six years of Franklin’s adult recording career is an exercise in analysis. Columbia’s pop sensibility reflected that of star producer and arranger Mitch Miller-no fan of the upstart rock ‘n’ roll of the 1950s-and its best singers were Rosemary Clooney, Tony Bennett, Johnny Mathis, and Barbra Streisand. They’re not the classics she would make in the future, but they exposed her incredible talent in ways that should be better appreciated. Those recordings, however, remain riveting. The bulk of her early career was the six years she spent recording for Columbia Records, during which she made ten albums that are largely forgotten today. But before then, she was singing on gospel tours, went on the road with Martin Luther King, Jr., and was mentored by talents like Jackie Wilson and Sam Cooke, who were friendly with her father, a celebrity preacher. In 1967 Franklin made her Atlantic Records debut with I Never Loved a Man Like I Love You, the first track of which was her timeless reimagining of Otis Redding’s “Respect”. However, the new box set Take a Look: Aretha Franklin Complete on Columbia goes much further, with more than 10 hours of material - including performance videos, unreleased songs, studio outtakes, even a couple of vintage radio ads.Before she was the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin was merely a fabulous singer. In fact, the rehabilitation of that catalog began with previous compilations, including 2002's The Queen In Waiting. To her credit, even as an unlikely torch singer, Aretha still knew how to smolder.įor all of the unevenness, there are more than enough diamonds to be dug out of Aretha's Columbia years. Unleashing her on top of a pleasant but innocuous jazz accompaniment is rather like bringing a fire hose to a water gun fight. That's not completely unfair: At times, the label did seem more interested in molding her to be the next Dinah Washington rather than the first Aretha Franklin. At the same recording session, her producers also had her borrow a page from the Judy Garland songbook with, shall we say, mixed results?įor many years, fans and critics largely dismissed Aretha's Columbia recordings, suggesting that various producers had mismanaged or underutilized her talents. On August 1, 1960, a shy, lanky teenager from Detroit walked into the East 30th Street Studios of New York's Columbia Records to record with the Ray Bryant Combo.Įven at 18, Aretha Franklin's voice was a marvel of rich timbre and piercing power, but it's not obvious that Columbia knew what to do with her. The new Aretha Franklin compilation Take a Look features the legendary singer's music from her years with Columbia Records.
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